New courses target the need for managers and techies to talk to each other as data proliferate

For most students, a top degree in a field such as computer science or maths ought to be a passport to a career perfectly in tune with the relentless digitisation of work.

For the 30 graduates taking up a new one-year course at MIT’s Sloan School of Management in September, it will be only the prelude to a spell in a Big Data finishing school.

This first cohort of students will pay $75,000 in tuition fees for their Master of Business Analytics degree, with classes ranging from “Data mining: Finding the Data and Models that Create Value” to “Applied Probability”.

They will be calculating that the qualification will sprinkle their CVs with extra stardust, attracting elite employers that are trying to find meaning in the increasing volumes of data that businesses are generating. Continue reading →

At The Data Incubator we run a free eight-week data science fellowship to help our Fellows land industry jobs. We love Fellows with diverse academic backgrounds that go beyond what companies traditionally think of when hiring data scientists. Matt was a Fellow in our Winter 2016 cohort who landed a job with one of our hiring partners, 1010data.

Tell us about your background. How did it set you up to be a great data scientist?

I defended my PhD dissertation at Washington University in St. Louis, a few weeks before coming to The Data Incubator. I was part of the MAPLE lab in Energy, Environmental, and Chemical Engineering (I know, it’s a mouthful). Our lab focused on physics-based electrochemical modeling, mostly geared toward Li-ion batteries.

For my main dissertation project, I studied how batteries age under different real-world cycling patterns. Most cycle life estimates for a battery are based on simple constant charge and constant discharge patterns, but lots of applications (such those experienced by batteries in electric vehicles or coupled to the electric grid) do not have simple cycling patterns. This variation effects the life of the battery.

Both through model simulation and long-term experiments, I had to analyze battery characteristics over thousands of cycles and pick out important features. This type of analysis along with programming computational models that were used to create these data sets helped give me a background to tackle data science problems.

Additionally, I think that working on my PhD projects allowed me to gain experience in solving unstructured problems, where the solution (and sometime even the problem/need) are not well defined. these type of problems are very common, especially once you get outside of academia.